How to Find Beauty

Marlane Ainsworth
Mar 20
2 min read

Beauty dwells at the heart of life

Close-up of large rock with moss and lichen covering most of it, surrounded by ferns, dead bark and grasses. — A beautiful rock in the Porongurup Range, Western Australia.

Most of us were brought up on graphic fairy tales that are impossible to forget. Lines like ‘Fee-fi-fo-fum’ and ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall’ will live with us until the day we die.

When the latest Disney version of Snow White was released, I immediately recalled my childhood image of the Wicked Queen standing before her bathroom mirror, asking:

Mirror, mirror on the wall

Who is the fairest of them all?

Of course, to move the story along, the mirror answers, ‘You are.’

But that was a lie.

Everyone is beautiful in their own way.

Everything is beautiful in its own way.

Beauty Dwells at the Heart of Life

We normally have a narrow concept of beauty. A cherubic baby in a lacey outfit, the photoshopped face of a film star, a diamond nestling in a circle of sapphires, an unfurling rosebud, a rising full moon.

But there is beauty in old bark, a wayside rock, a hole in the ground, a cracked flower pot.

Close-up of a cracked and glued back together terracotta pot with greenery in and around it. — An old and repaired terracotta flower pot at Evergreen, still gracing the place with its beauty.

My eyesight may be fading but the older I get the more beauty I see.

I’m reminded almost daily of words by John O’Donohue in his book Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace.

Beauty is not an extra luxury, an accidental experience that we happen to have if we are lucky. Beauty dwells at the heart of life.

Here’s a Coco Chanel quote worth remembering more than Fe-Fi-Fo-Fum:

Beauty begins the moment you decide to be yourself.

And here’s a fun quote from Miss Piggy:

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye!

Let’s save ourselves a black eye and see beauty everywhere.

As O’Donohue wrote:

Beauty dwells at the heart of life.